Spent last week in Utah, and am currently reading Desert Solitaire. Putting together a five year plan which involves a year on the road/in parks but maybe I'm just a bit too influenced by recent events.

Edit: left my rental car lights on all night and now the car battery is dead. Awesome start to a work trip.

I won’t gush into details but I’ve made 5 year plans on and off with mostly limited attention to them afterwards since I was 19.

A year or so ago I realized that all my big goals id laid out in such? The big ones; the pinnacle ones?

Somehow, I’d achieved. Or was on track to do so. (Still am, in fact.)

This year I’m working the most ultra version of a 5 year plan I’ve ever made, and I’m actually working it. The internet helped me break the big wide category of “life” down into about 8 sub vectors to help direct my goals. I’ve got fleshed out 1 year goals for all of them. (The further out you go in time the harder I find it to make real hard dependable goals, so my plan gets sparse after 2 year or so, but I do have goals up to the 5 year mark. Just fewer and fewer.)

I took those big goals and every month I’ve been breaking down the process of how to get there with littler goals. I track most of ‘em with my handy tracker app; some don’t need it, some do. I check in on how I’m doing - supposedly every week but really more like every other. I assess how I’m doing and if I’m on track at mid month. I note the date I achieve a monthly goal if it’s discretely achievable. Goals I try at but don’t achieve I push to next month. I try to break everything down into measurable, concrete actions which I can clearly see how they tie back to my big goals.

If this sounds really awful, “fun” is one of the 8 sub categories. And I’m the one who sets the goals based on the person I thought about and decided I wanted to be, and the things I thought about and decided I wanted to achieve for myself. So sure it sounds like school or project management...but everything is for myself. So why would it be awful? To do the work to achieve the great and wonderful things?

Dude I fucking love it. It feels great. I know what I’m doing and more importantly I see why and how it’s gojng to help get me where I really want to go. I’ve started meal planning both as part of one of my goals and also because...order and planning and this sort of structure, turns out, are really good for me. At least better than the lifestyle I was living.

I try really hard to observe what naturally works well for me and use that to make my goals easier. I want to figure out some kind of incentive structure to help reward when I hit my goals but haven’t yet because I didn’t want it to be food or alcohol related and giving myself spending money just doesn’t make a really decent incentive. ESP as a primary goal is saving right now.

Just achieving the goals, turns out, feels good enough to keep me going. In my down time sometimes I try to research how to do this stuff better (I didn’t come up with those life sub categories on my own) too.

Doooooo eettttttt. Babies aren’t the only ones who benefit from structure and routine.

i keep the whole bundle in a folder which just keeps getting huger and huger

This is awesome ref. What are the 8 subcategories that help you think about what needs goal-defining? Are they the items under the MY PLAN heading in the photo?

I've also found that when I look over old journals or wishlists, a lot of what's written under the "goals" heading are either 1) still goals or 2) accomplished since. It seems that goal-setting (or dissatisfaction with the present, depending on how you look at it) is a persistent state. And the joy of completing goals is fleeting. When I take stock, there's a lot to be happy about. But there's always something more. Is there anything more to goal-setting than the exercise of spinning the wheel? (That's a bit tongue in cheek)